Pireeni Sundaralingam is a neuroscientist and poet, born in Sri Lanka,raised there and in England, and now living in San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, World Literature Today, the Guardian, and several anthologies. From “Lot’s Wives”: “We stood/ as women before us have stood, /Looking back at our burning cities,/ watching the smoke/ rise from our emptyhomes. / I was quiet then. And cold. . . .”

Vijay Seshadri, born in Bangalore, living in Brooklyn, has published several volumes of poetry, WildKingdom (1996) and The Long Meadow (2004). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the American Scholar, the Nation, the Paris Review, and numerous anthologies, and he has received prizes from the Paris Review, the Macdowell Colony, and the Academy of American Poets, and grants from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation. From “Disappearances,” “This iswhat you have to walk through to escape,/ transparent but alive as coaldust./This is what you have to hack through,/ bamboo-tough and thicklyclustered./ The myths are somewhere else, but here are the meanings,/ And you have to breathe them in. . . .”

R. Parthasarathy, born in Tamil Nadu, brought up in Bombay, and professor emeritus of English and Asian Studies at Skidmore, lives in Saratoga Springs. Award-winning translator of The Tale of an Anklet, anthologized in the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Penguin New Writing in India, editor of Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, Partha is also the author of the evolving Rough Passage. From Exile, “in a corner, an unrepentant schoolboy,/ book in hand, / spanning an empire/ from the Tagus to the China Sea./ I stop to take a picture:/ a storm of churches breaks about my eyes.”